Your Bat Flu Breaking Point

Rod Dreher is a writer who blogs at the website of The American Conservative, the magazine founded by Pat Buchanan, Taki Theodoracopulos and Scott McConnell in 2002 to oppose the foreign policy of the George W. Bush administration and more specifically the drive for war in Iraq from the right.   Dreher is also the author of such books as Crunchy Cons (2006), How Dante Can Save Your Life (2015), The Benedict Option (2017), and most recently, Live Not By Lies which was released earlier this year.   The last title mentioned warns small-o orthodox Christians – Dreher, who was raised Protestant, became a Roman Catholic and is now Eastern Orthodox with a large-O – about the coming “soft totalitarianism” to which wokeness, the more militant successor to political correctness, is leading the Western world.  Note that there are many who would generally agree with Dreher’s assessment of wokeness but suggest that a past tense would be more appropriate than a future one.

 

Earlier this year, Dreher posted a piece entitled “Your Woke Breaking Point” at his blog.   He began with an excerpt from an article by Megan McArdle at the Washington Post about how Donald Trump’s predictions of four years ago as to how the attacks on Confederate monuments would lead to attacks on monuments to the American republic’s founders, such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, were coming true.   McArdle, in her editorial, referenced Dreher’s “Law of Merited Impossibility” which has been stated several different ways, the best known being “It will never happen, and when it does you bigots will deserve it”.    The law satirizes, without exaggerating in the least, the paradox of the typical progressive response to conservative warnings about the direction in which left-wing causes seem to be heading, before and after the predictions are fulfilled.   It is likely to end up being Dreher’s single most significant and lasting contribution to political discourse.    McArdle’s article referencing it was an uncharacteristic moment of liberal self-criticism, in which she discussed the progressive side’s seeming inability to restrain its radicals and apply the brakes when they are going too far and too fast.

 

Dreher used the excerpt from McArdle’s article to introduce a challenge that he borrowed from mathematician James A. Lindsay.   Lindsay had tweeted on the 24^th of June:

 

Talking with a brilliant friend last night keyed me into an important idea: everybody has a Woke breaking point, a point where they can’t deny any longer the fact that it’s a totalitarian nightmare. Encourage your sympathetic friends to start naming what theirs would be.

 

Dreher re-posted Lindsay’s tweet and several follow-up tweets, the first of which went:

Whose statue has to come down? Seriously, whose is the last straw? Who has to get cancelled? Fired? Doxxed? Destroyed? Beaten up? Killed? Does it take a lynching?  Does it take destroying the thing YOU love? Your family? Your kids? Your job? Your hobby? What is it? What’s too far?

 

It is an excellent question and one that we would do well to pose to any liberals of our acquaintance.  What do the Social Justice Warriors – the BLM, Antifa and MeToo# types -- have to do before you will admit that they have gone too far?  

 

There is a very similar question that I would suggest we start posing to people.   Or perhaps it is the same question asked in a different context.

 

This question I would pose to all those people who think that all the public health orders, all the restrictions imposed to control the spread of the Wuhan bat flu, are necessary and especially to those who think that even more restrictions are called for.   I will note, obiter dictum, that Rod Dreher himself was certainly one of these back in the spring.   Whether he still is or not I am unaware because he has written far less on that subject in recent months than in March, April and May.  

 

The question is simply this – what is your Bat Flu Breaking Point? 

 

Let us clarify the matter with some follow up questions.

 

What do our public health officials have to do for you to agree that they have gone too far?   What line do they have to cross?   What freedom do they have to take away?   How much imposed loneliness, isolation, and misery is too much?   How many small businesses have to be destroyed?   How many people have to lose their jobs?   How many people have to be driven to suicide, drunkenness and substance abuse?   At what point is keeping us safe no longer worth the price we are being forced to pay for it?

 

Would curtailing to the point of eliminating our basic freedoms of association, assembly and religion be going too far?

 

Would telling people that they have to close the small businesses that has been in their families and served their local communities for generations and which they have been struggling to keep afloat for years right in the busiest shopping time of the year, the period that they rely upon to make enough to balance their books, be crossing the line?

 

Would fining people thousands of dollars for acts that are not only not mala in se but are rather clearly bona in se although forbidden by some petty health order be one step too many in the direction of totalitarianism?

 

Would opening a snitch line and encouraging people to rat out their family, friends and neighbours be the straw that breaks the camel’s back?

 

Would establishing a special police force – a Gestapo, Cheka/NKVD, or Stasi so to speak – for enforcing public health orders be the limit of what is tolerable?

 

Everything I have mentioned so far has already been done here in Manitoba and, indeed, in most if not all of the other provinces of the Dominion of Canada.   For the many who support all of these measures and say they are “necessary” it is difficult to imagine what further step could possibly be taken that would finally have these people saying that it is too much.  

 

Would it take forcing everybody to have foreign substances, including modified RNA, injected into their bodies upon penalty of not being allowed to work, buy groceries, or go anywhere if they refuse?

 

Would even telling everyone that they must pledge their allegiance to Satan by having 666 tattooed on their right hand or forehead in order to stop the spread of COVID-19 finally be enough to do it?

 

Ask everyone you know who is in favour of the sanitary dictatorship what their Bat Flu Breaking Point is.

 

 

 

 

 

 

May They Rest in Peace

The last couple of years have seen the passing of several individuals whose thought has been influential on my own. In May of last year, the Hungarian born historian, John Lukacs passed away from congestive heart failure. I have had cause over the last month to recall Lukacs’ definition of history as “the remembered past” more than once. The past itself, of course, is beyond the reach of the mad iconoclasts, but history, through which we learn from the past, is under siege. It was from Lukacs, especially his first volume of memoir Confessions of an Original Sinner (1990), rather than from Mencius Moldbug, that I learned to embrace the label “reactionary.” He was an Anglophile and a Roman Catholic, who had fled to the United States after his native country was taken over first by the Nazis and then by the Communists, preferring America’s liberal republicanism over either of the rival twentieth century totalitarianisms, but whose sympathies in many ways lay with the pre-modern, pre-liberal, order of civilization. He warned against the dangers of populism and nationalism, but was also the author of a pamphlet that argued strongly against the kind of immigration that populists and nationalists generally oppose. He was also wise enough to see that the Modern Age was over, without turning that into a weird pretext for separating language from reality.

The following month came the news that Justin Raimondo had passed away from lung cancer. Raimondo was a very interesting character. He was raised in the state of New York and lived most of his adult life in California, two rather left-leaning states. He was the founder and editor of Antiwar.com, a website opposed to American military interventionism and adventurism. Raised Roman Catholic, he lost his faith, and was openly homosexual. While that may sound like the resume of an ultra-progressive, he supported arch-conservative Pat Buchanan all three times Buchanan ran for the presidency of the United States, to the point of actually working for the campaign. The last time Buchanan ran it was as the Reform candidate in 2000. Raimondo had addressed that party’s national convention urging them to nominate Buchanan, obviously successfully. More recently, and right up until his death, Raimondo had been a strong supporter of Donald J. Trump. His politics were, in fact, right-libertarian, and more specifically the kind of right-libertarian that is called “paleo-libertarian.” Think Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell, and Hans-Herman Hoppe. Indeed, Raimondo was the author of the biography, An Enemy of the State (2000) of the father of paleo-libertarianism, Murry N. Rothbard. He was also the author of a history of the American “Old Right”, i.e., the American Right of the 1930s and 1940s that preceded William F. Buckley Jr., National Review, and the American Conservative movement. This Right began as opposition to the expansion of the American government in the Depression under FDR, and also on non-interventionist grounds opposed American entry into World War II prior to Pearl Harbour. Raimondo’s history was entitled Reclaiming the American Right: Reclaiming the Legacy of the Conservative Movement (1993). Buchanan wrote the foreword. I have read both of these books, as well as his The Terror Enigma: 9/11 and the Israeli Connection (2003), although it was the monthly column he wrote for Chronicles in the last few years of his life that I appreciated the most out of all his writings.

Earlier this year, in a single week we lost both Sir Roger Scruton and Christopher Tolkien. Tolkien, who was the youngest member of the 1930s-40s Oxford literary club, the Inklings, will be remembered not as a primary author, but as the editor who took the supplementary writings to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings that his father, J. R. R. Tolkien, had left behind, edited them for publication.

Sir Roger Scruton, on the other hand, has left behind a vast corpus of writing on pretty much every subject imaginable. While primarily a philosopher who specialized in aesthetics – the branch of philosophy that deals with art and beauty – he was a true polymath. I have written reviews of two of his books – The Meaning of Conservatism (1980) and How to Think Seriously About The Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism (2012). The first was written at the beginning of the premiership of Margaret Thatcher and the presidency of Ronald Reagan to show that true conservatism was not an ideological argument for freedom and capitalism, per se, but a reflexive defence of the good things which make up a civilized order, which are “easily destroyed, but not easily created.” The second examined the conservative roots of environmentalism to make the case for the responsible preservation of the beauty of our surroundings and our natural resources while avoiding the pitfalls of extremism that the environmentalism movement is noted for falling into. Many other of his books, including but not limited to his memoir Gentle Regrets, his short introduction to Beauty, his books on the aesthetics of music, his history of the Anglican Church, his takedown of the thought of the leading intellectuals of the Postmodern and Critical Theory influenced New Left, and his defence of Western Civilization against those who would attack it from without and within, The West and the Rest, have been of tremendous benefit to me. Countless of his insights, such as into the difference between “giving offence” and “taking offence”, as well as his countering the left-wing charge of “xenophobia” with that of “oikophobia”, a term borrowed from the Lake Poet Robert Southey, are particularly relevant to this moment in time. So, for that matter is his personal experience. As related in Gentle Regrets and elsewhere in his writings, it was when he witnessed student radicals in the late 1960s behaving basically the way BLM and Antifa are acting today, with nothing but Marxist gibberish to back up their actions, that he realized his fundamental opposition to this sort of thing and became a conservative. Let us hope that many today will experience something similar, in reaction against the revolting, in both senses of the word, “woke.”

Alan Clark used to refer to Enoch Powell, the Tory statesman who delivered a famous speech warning against immigration and the consequences of the Race Relations Bill to Birmingham in 1968, as “the prophet.” The same appellation could be applied to French author and explorer Jean Raspail, who died earlier this month at the age of 94. He travelled the world in his early life, exploring, and doing what could have been preparatory field work for a career as an anthropologist. His earliest writings were travel memoirs, later he turned to writing novels, incorporating his experiences of the world while globetrotting into his fiction. It was these which won him critical acclaim. His religious and political views – he was a traditionalist Roman Catholic, a royalist who longed for the restoration of a legitimate, Catholic, French monarchy, and someone who deplored most if not all modern ideas, trends, and movements – also found their way into his books. The most well-known of his novels, however, which appeared in French in 1973 and in English translation by Norman Shapiro in 1975, was The Camp of the Saints.

The title alone, borrowed from the twentieth chapter of St. John’s Apocalypse, suggests the prophetic nature of the novel. The story opens on Easter morning on the French Riviera, where a retired academic from his home near the ocean, watches as masses of liberal lunatics gather on the beach to welcome the arrival of a vast mass of the poorest of Calcutta’s poor, arriving on ninety-nine ships. The novel then goes back a few months in time to explain how they got to that point. The Belgian government had closed down a charitable adoption program when it was swamped with too many applications, after which, a prophet of sorts, “the turd eater”, having been turned away from the Belgian consulate, addresses the multitude with a parable that curiously borrows the lines from Revelation from which the title of the novel is derived, although twisting their meaning to the effect that the thousand years allotted to the God of the Christians was at an end, and now He must surrender His kingdom to Allah, Buddah, and an assortment of Hindu deities. At his encouragement they board the hundred ships – one is lost along the way – and set sail for France. This provokes much discussion in France over what is to be done – but due to the extreme liberal cultural climate, everyone - the politicians, news media and celebrities, clerics, very interestingly headed by a Latin American pope – all give the answer that the migrants must be accepted and welcomed. The armada is dubbed the “Last Chance Armada” as in the “last chance for mankind” and this, along with “We are all from the Ganges now” and other such tripe are the only acceptable way of speaking about the situation. A handful of individuals are brave enough to dissent – we are slowly introduced to them throughout the novel – and these all gather at the aforementioned academic’s house to make one last stand for Western Civilization. When the French president, who knows full well what must be done and had been counting on the only remaining right-wing publisher in France to make the point for him, sends the military to the beach, he cannot find the courage to order them to fire, and leaves it up to their consciences, at which point they defect. France is swamped and shortly thereafter coloured immigrant communities rise up in major cities throughout what was once Western civilization, while Western borders fall as the Chinese swarm into Russia, the Palestinians overwhelm Israel, etc. The narrator, indicates that the bastion from which he is writing, Switzerland is about to fall, bringing white, Christian, Western Civilization to an end forever.

It is almost twenty years since I read this novel for the first time. I have read it many times since and, to compound the thought crime indictment against me, have given copies of it out to others. Over the course of the last decade, it has come more and more to resemble a prophetic description of our own times. Its author lived to see this happen. Let us hope and pray that the story does not end the way he wrote it.

A History Lesson

The white European powers of the colonial era did not invent slavery. They did not even invent black slavery. Until quite recently in human history slavery existed on every continent on earth, except Antarctica. Indians enslaved other Indians in the Americas before the arrival of the white man. African tribes were enslaving their captives of war – other Africans – and selling them to the Arabs and the Chinese as far back as the Tang dynasty, which was long before the Portuguese became the first Europeans to get involved in the African slave trade. Asians had been enslaved by other Asians throughout history, and Europeans by other Europeans at various points in their history.

It was Europe’s getting involved in the African slave trade that led ultimately to that system’s demise. When the European powers began purchasing slaves from African slave traders, the age of exploration was beginning, and along with it the settling of colonies in the New World. Slavery flourished for a period that, from a historical point of view, was quite brief, before reformers, some motivated by Christianity, others by the emerging liberalism of the Modern Age, demanded its abolition. Early in the nineteenth century, the United Kingdom took up that cause. She abolished the slave trade throughout her empire in 1807, and slavery itself in 1833. In Canada, we were a bit ahead of the rest of the Empire in this. Upper Canada – now called Ontario – banned the importation of slaves, and began the gradual emancipation of the few that were here, in 1793.

These Acts did not abolish slavery in the United States for the obvious reason that the Americans had seceded from the British Empire in their Revolution in the 1770s. Nevertheless, they led to the abolitionist movement gaining strength in the United States since the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire, which abolition the Empire was backing up with naval force, cut the American slave trade off from its supply.

In the 1860s the Americans went to war with each other. The first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, was elected in the fall of 1860 without any electoral seats from the states south of the Mason-Dixon Line. In ten of those states he had received no votes whatsoever, and he won only two out of almost a thousand counties. The United States was divided and polarized, and this would not be the last time, but here the divide coincided with a regional division on the map. Slavery was only one of the issues that divided the North and the South, nor was it the main issue. The conflict was primarily one between a modernizing, increasingly urban, society, with a secularized Puritan culture, intend on building an economy based on industrial manufacture on the one hand and a more traditional, rural society that was more conservative in its religion and wished to retain an agricultural way of life on the other. When Lincoln was elected without any support from the latter, the Southern states opted to secede and form the Confederate States of America. They believed they were within their constitutional rights to do so and while this was a hot topic at the time, this was certainly in keeping with the Jeffersonian or anti-federalist interpretation of the American constitution.

Lincoln was personally opposed to slavery, but this was not what motivated his actions. In his first Inaugural Address, he promised to drop the issue if the Southern states would return. To keep the South in the United States he ordered an invasion of the South, leading to a war that cost more American lives that the Spanish-American War, the two World Wars, and the Korean War combined. The campaign was fought according to the pattern that is now called “total war”, laying waste to the Southern countryside. Waging such a war against people who by your own theory are still your brethren and countrymen was and is considered atrocious and required an iron-clad moral justification. Modernizing the economy simply would not cut it. It is for this reason that the Northern interpretation of these events has always placed the stress on the abolition of slavery, often to the exclusion of all other causes of the war.

It should be noted that another man at the time who condemned slavery as a “moral and political evil” was Robert E. Lee, the brilliant general to whom Lincoln had first offered the command of the Union forces. He turned it down and resigned his commission rather than draw his sword against his native state of Virginia. Lee, even though he thought secession was a foolish idea, offered his services to Virginia and was given charge over the Army of Northern Virginia. By the end of the war he had gone from being the de facto to being the official, supreme commander of the Southern forces.

The reason this ought to be noted is because events like those of the 1860s could very well have increased, rather than decreased, the animosity between the two regions of the United States, and to prevent this from happening the Americans eventually settled on a compromise. Just as Homer eulogized Hector as well as Achilles in The Iliad, so the heroes on both sides would be honoured. This helped cement their country back together, and the United States gained from it for by all accounts the most honourable leaders in the conflict were men like the aforementioned General Lee and his associate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. The agreement to honour both sides was an honest effort to heal a wound, repair a division, and unite a country, and for a century it was successful.

The exact opposite is true of what the Black Lives Matter movement is currently doing.

While Black Lives Matter and Antifa, if it is indeed right to think of the two as separate entities, claim to hate racism, it is really white people they hate. If they really hated racism, their goal would be for blacks and whites to get along, for there to be racial peace and harmony. Instead, they have been fomenting racial strife and division. Or they would be, if whites still had self-respect, or at the very least the instinct for self-preservation, enough to stand up for themselves. Since that does not appear to be the case, what we are seeing instead is a form of one-sided violence, a bullying or beating-up on whites.

The “anti-racist” left has for some time now been trying to undo the aforementioned post-bellum healing of the American nation by demanding the removal of Confederate flags, statues of Lee, Jackson, and other Southern military heroes, and that streets, buildings and cities named after these men be renamed. Three years ago, they turned up to counter-protest what would, unlike the Black Lives Matter riots that are mislabeled such by the mainstream media, otherwise have truly been a “peaceful protest” against the removal of Robert E. Lee’s statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, and turned it into a violent brouhaha that led to the deaths of three people, the blame for which, predictably, was placed entirely on those who objected to the removal of the statue, although it was the other side that started the violence. They are now capitalizing on the outrage over George Floyd’s death to demand and obtain the removal of these Confederate monuments.

They are not stopping with the Confederate monuments, however, as those of us who have all along opposed the attack on those monuments knew they would not. Patrick Buchanan asks in his latest column whether George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and basically everybody who built the United States, will be next. It is a rhetorical question, I am sure. He knows the answer as well as I do.

In London, the statue of Sir Winston Churchill has been defaced, and the British government has ordered it boarded up to protect it against further vandalism. This was, of course, the same Sir Winston Churchill who led the free world in the war against the German dictator whose name has become virtually synonymous with white racism. In Leeds, a statue of Queen Victoria has been similarly defaced. Queen Victoria reigned over a British Empire in which slavery had been abolished. The bill accomplishing that had been signed into law by her father William IV, four years prior to her accession. Her government took great lengths to make sure that bill was enforced.

Here in the Dominion of Canada, Black Lives Matter has been demanding the removal of the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald in Montreal. Their charge against the leading Father of Confederation and our country’s first Prime Minister is that he started the Indian Residential Schools. The rebuttal to this, not that facts matter to these pathetic know-nothings, is that the Churches had started the residential schools on their own prior to Confederation, Sir John A. MacDonald began funding the schools to fulfil the Dominion’s obligation under the treaties to provide the Indians with education, that the abuses which have given these schools a bad name come from the anecdotal evidence collected by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which pertains to a period long after Sir John A. Macdonald’s premiership, and that these schools, whose language immersion policies were by no means uniform, no more practiced “cultural genocide” than French immersion schools do today.

It is absurd to judge the leaders of a hundred or more years ago, by standards which we have invented in our own day, as if we, who are living in what is probably the greatest age of moral depravity since the days of Noah and Sodom and Gomorrah, have any right to establish such standards. This is especially true, when the standards pertain to racism, and we are hypocritically demanding from the white leaders of the past, a perfect adherence to standards which the non-whites of the present day are never expected to keep.

The demands and actions of the Black Lives Matter mob are leading us down a path to greater racial violence, not to racial peace and harmony. But then, mobs always lead to violence rather than peace and harmony. Either the promoters of this nonsense know that and it is their intention, or they have never learned from the history they seek to erase.

The Westminster System is Better Than Republicanism

That the Westminster parliamentary system of government is a superior form of government to any republicanism has been a lifelong conviction of mine. This will come as a surprise to none of my long-time readers, I am sure.

There are many reasons for this conviction. On one level it is simple patriotism. True patriotism - as opposed to nationalism, which is the ideological devotion to an ideal vision of one's nation - is love, affection and loyalty for one's country because it is one's own. It is by nature the same thing as the love one ordinarily feels for one's family and home, just on a larger scale. The Westminster parliamentary system of government is the traditional form of government of my country, the Dominion of Canada, which inherited it from the United Kingdom where it originally developed. We share this form of government with the UK and several other countries in the British Commonwealth, or, as I often call it, the British family of nations.

There is a theoretical foundation for the conviction, however. Two and a half millennia ago, Plato, of whom A. N. Whitehead wrote that all of Western philosophy is just a series of footnotes, wrote his most important dialogue, the Politeia. The title is usually translated "The Republic" from the Latin De Republica, which means "about the affairs of the public" but this is misleading because of the connotations the word "republic" now has. In the dialogue, Plato has Socrates debate the nature of justice , first with Thrasymachus, who maintains that injustice is superior to justice, and then with Glaucon (Plato's brother) who asks, in response to Socrates' answer to Thrasymachus, why justice itself is to be preferred over the mere appearance of justice. Socrates proposes that they found a hypothetical city-state and look at justice as it would be in that state on the theory that by seeing it viewed on a large scale there, they would be better able to understand the nature of justice in the individual.

The hypothetical ideal city-state is ruled by kings who are also philosophers, men who through higher thought have been able to catch a glimpse of goodness, truth, and beauty as they are in themselves, and not merely their worldly imitations. The constitution of this city-state is dubbed royal/aristocratic by Plato through Socrates, and is contrasted with actual constitutions of which four are identified. States, according to Plato, have the tendency to shift from one of these to the next as extremes beget their opposites and so states go from timocracy - the closest to the ideal, the rule of honour-seeking aristocrats, identified with the government of Sparta at the time, to oligarchy, the rule of the wealthy few, to democracy, which ultimately begets tyranny. This is a progression, in Plato's view, from best to worst.

Aristotle, Plato's student, modified his teacher's political theories by proposing that there were three simple constitutions - the rule of the one, the few, and the many which have good and bad forms depending upon whether the one, the few, or the many govern for themselves at the expense of the common good or for the sake of the common good. Like Plato, Aristotle saw states as going through these constitutions in cyclical fashion, but theorized that the cycle could be broken and a lasting, stable, constitution produced, by mixing monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, checking the worst tendencies of each and bringing out the best of all.

The Westminster parliamentary system is the living embodiment of this mixed constitution. The Americans also had Aristotle's ideal in mind when they drew up their republican constitution, but the Westminster system, forged over centuries of history, has the greater weight of prescriptive tradition behind it.

The Founding Fathers of the United States, in devising their republic, saw the importance of separating the executive, legislative, and judicial powers of government. They were heavily influenced by the theories of Montesquieu who in turn looked to the Westminster system as the already-existing model of this separation. In the Westminster system these powers are both united and separated at the same time, with no contradiction, because the uniting factor is the Sovereign Crown. In Canada we speak of the distinction between "the Queen-in-council" (the executive branch, consisting of the Queen, usually represented by the Governor General, and privy council, the day-to-day business of which is carried out by the Prime Minister and Cabinet), "the Queen-in-Parliament" (the legislative branch, consisting of the House of Commons, Senate and again the Queen, usually through vice regal representation), and "the Queen-on-the-bench"(the judicial branch, the courts). The Westminster system makes this harmonious separation-in-unity of the powers possible, by distinguishing between the ownership of the powers of government, which belongs in each case to the Monarch, and the exercise of the powers which are carried out in her name by different groups of people. There is a slight overlap, in that the Prime Minister and Cabinet ministers are also members of Parliament, but this is supposed to make the Cabinet, responsible for the everyday decisions of the executive branch of government, dually accountable, both to the Sovereign above in whose name they act and to the Parliament below.

There are many reasons for preferring this to the republican system. As I have discussed in many previous essays, history shows us that when government is thought of as the property of "the people" and leaders see themselves as the champions of "the people", traditional limitations on the use of government power break down. A government that acts in the name of the people can justify whatever it does to the people. Hitler saw himself as one of the common people, the first among equal brothers, empowered to act as the voice of the people in carrying out his tyrannical murderous evil deeds. The same was true of Stalin and every other totalitarian despot. By contrast, when the ownership of government power belongs to a Royal Sovereign, who stands in a paternal or maternal relationship to the people, the people who exercise the powers of government are in the position of being servants - which is what the word minister means - to their Royal master. This is a humbling position, and if the exercise of government power is to be carried out by politicians - people who by definition are power-seekers and therefore the most likely to be corrupted by actual power - it is all the more important that they be placed in a position of humility rather than one that promotes arrogance.

When a king or queen reigns over your country it adds a touch of class that is simply not present in a republic.

The events that we have seen in the republic south of our border this week testify to another strength of our system. No, I am not referring to the election of Donald Trump to the American presidency, which event I welcome for reasons explained elsewhere, but rather to the response to it. Protests have broken out all over America, ranging from the juvenile but fairly innocuous antics of Stefani Germanotta outside the Trump Tower in New York to the violent riots such as have been taking place in Portland, Oregon. Unsurprisingly, many of the protests appear to have been organized by the George Soros funded MoveOn, but the sentiment shared by all, organized or spontaneous, peaceful or violent, is expressed in the words "not my president."

Had the election gone the other way, the same sentiment would have been expressed by the other side. Whether it would have gotten this violent or not is difficult to say. The liberal media certainly feared it would, but that means very little as their powers of prediction have not been particularly great as of late. There was certainly potential for a violent uprising, however. The men and women who turned out in droves to vote for Trump included many white, middle and working class Americans who have been scapegoated by the American political, cultural, economic, and academic establishment for decades, seeing their jobs being exported and their replacements imported and their objections to all of this answered with vile accusations of bigotry, prejudice, ignorance and hatred. To these, the forgotten Americans whom the president-elect vowed in his victory speech would never be forgotten again, and whom Hillary Clinton had dismissed as "a basketful of deplorables", Trump had offered a glimmer of hope for the first time in years and, as Pat Buchanan pointed out in September, this election was really their last chance.

This was the most polarizing election the American republic has seen since 1860. The election of Abraham Lincoln that year, incidentally, makes nonsense out of the claim that we heard from many pundits last month in feigned shock over Trump’s unwillingness to invite fraud by making a preliminary concession to Clinton, that the United States has experienced 227 years of uninterrupted peaceful transfer of power. That election split the country in two and brought about a four year internecine war that saw over 600, 000 casualties. Hardly what one could call a peaceful transition of power. At any rate, the election this year has revealed a division between Americans that rivals that of 1860 in its extent and intensity. It is a division that is unlikely to be healed any time soon, since the liberal left continues to reject the validity of the complaints of white, middle and working class Americans against their agenda and to accuse these Americans of being “hateful” and “bigoted” while scarcely bothering to conceal their own hatred of the same beneath the thin veneer of their positive-sounding but empty platitudes such as “love trumps hate.”

The weakness of the republican system revealed in all of this is that the president, who is head of state of the republic, is supposed to be the person who represents the country as a collective whole – as opposed to the members of the House of Representative, who represent their own districts, and the Senators who represent their own States. The president, however, is chosen by election, making it possible for those who voted against him to plausibly claim that he is “not my president.”

In the Westminster system, the head of state is the monarch, who is not elected. Since her position is hereditary, she is above the divisive and polarizing, political process, and is therefore a better symbol of the unity of the country than an elected president. Indeed, since she is the descendent of previous monarchs and ancestor of future monarchs, she is a symbol not just of the present unity of the country, but of the unity of the country across past, present, and future generations as well, and of our country's enduring link to other countries in the British family of nations. The party which wins a majority or a plurality in the House of Commons forms Her Majesty’s government and its leader becomes Prime Minister but the second largest party in the House has a role as well as Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. The Opposition’s role is to challenge the policies and practices of the government, to hold it accountable to Parliament, and to be the Parliamentary voice of those who did not win the last election. The unifying factor, to which government and Opposition alike are supposed to be loyal, is the Royal Sovereign. No matter which party wins the election, even if the Prime Minister is a mindless, smug, smarmy, contemptable, little waste of space who never sold his soul to the devil only because he never possessed one to sell in the first place, like the present Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, all Canadians can look to our head of state and say “God Save the Queen!”

That is something for which, in light of the riots and uproar our republican neighbours are experiencing, we can be truly thankful.

God Save the Queen!

Weighing Evils

Since the birth of the internet there have been certain memes which recur online once every four years when the Americans have their presidential election. Of these, one of my favourites is the “Cthulhu for President” meme. Cthulhu is an entity from the stories of H. P. Lovecraft, an early twentieth century writer of gothic horror and science fiction. An ancient space demon, described as a giant humanoid with a head like an octopus, Lovecraft’s Cthulhu lies sleeping in the city of R’lyeh somewhere at the bottom of the ocean awaiting the cosmic re-alignment in which he will awaken and plunge the world into madness, chaos and destruction. The slogan for his perennial mock presidential candidacy is “why settle for the lesser evil?”

This slogan and, indeed, the entire Cthulhu for president meme, pokes fun at the idea of voting for the lesser of two evils which is sure to be put forward by the supporters of at least one of the two actual candidates. The idea is that you ought to vote for candidate X, not because of the merits of candidate X, but because candidate Y is so much worse. It is indicative of just how bad the quality of politicians has become when you find this argument being invoked in every election by both parties.

This has been the case for at least two decades, if not longer, now. To be fair, it is the Republicans who have usually fallen back on the lesser of two evils theme for such less-than-spectacular candidates as Dole, Romney, and McCain. The Democrats tend to prefer their own variation of the theme which is to compare the Republican candidate to Hitler.

This year’s election has probably set a record for most uses and abuses of both of these themes. What is somewhat odd this time around is that the same person is the target of both. It has been no surprise to see the Democrats, and the left in general, try to portray the Republican candidate, Donald J. Trump, as the second coming of Adolf Hitler. What has been more unusual is that the same establishment Republicans who trotted out the lesser of two evils argument for George W. Bush twice, have been using it this year against their party’s own candidate on the behalf of the candidate of the other party. A recent example of this can be found in the article “The Conservative Case for Voting for Clinton” which recently appeared on the website of The Atlantic. The author is David Frum, son of legendary CBC interviewer Barbra Frum, brother of Canadian Senator Linda Frum, son-in-law of the late, great, Peter Worthington, founding editor of the Toronto Sun, and speechwriter/biographer of former US President George W. Bush. The title can only be regarded as something of a sick joke. Frum, whose emigration to the United States I have often said is our country’s gain and America’s loss, has been a thorn in the side of conservatives on both sides of the 49th parallel for almost three decades now. In Canada, he was not a traditional Tory, i.e., a defender of our British institutions and heritage against American political, economic and cultural imperialism. Nor was he a genuine right-wing populist of the mold of the original Reform Party and was constantly calling upon that party to abandon the social and moral conservatism that were its most genuinely conservative positions and adopt a blend of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism. In the United States he is neither a Burkean traditionalist of the Russell Kirk, Robert Nisbet variety, nor a true libertarian. His idea of a “conservative” would appear to be a corporate, internationalist, free-trader who believes in a global Pax Americana. Thirteen years ago, he had the gall to write a despicable article for National Review – which had the poor taste to actually publish it – accusing American conservatives like Pat Buchanan, Sam Francis, Charley Reese, and Bob Novak of being “unpatriotic” for having the prescience to see that the Bush administration’s plans for invading Iraq were foolhardy and would prove disastrous. Now, in an article that maintains that to “vote for Trump as a protest against Clinton’s faults would be like amputating a leg because of a sliver in the toe” Frum says of Hillary Clinton - the same Hillary Clinton who told an audience of Brazilian bankers that her dream “is a hemispheric common market with open trade and open borders” - that she “is a patriot” and that she “will uphold the sovereignty and independence of the United States.” Someone ought to buy this man a dictionary because it is apparent that he does not know the meanings of the words he uses.

How anybody could look at Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and say that the former is the lesser of two evils is beyond me.

Compare the personality flaws of the two. Donald Trump is boisterous, vulgar, hotheaded, crude, and emotional. Hillary Clinton is cold, calculating, manipulative, and ruthless. Trump’s failings are those of a human being – Clinton’s are those of a robot programmed to act out Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince.

Now consider the past misdeeds of the two. Everyone is familiar with the accusations against Trump because – despite Frum’s feeble attempt to deny the overwhelming pro-Clinton bias of the media – they have been in the headlines and aired around the clock on all the major news networks for a month. One of these – claiming business losses against one’s income taxes – is hardly a misdeed, but something every rational person does, the alternative being to unnecessarily fork over to the government large amounts of your income. When the Clinton campaign and its disinformation arm, also known as the mainstream media, focus on matters like this it is not people’s moral outrage to which they are making an appeal but their envy. As for the far more serious accusation of being a sexual predator, while his behaviour can certainly be described as sleazy the attempts to spin it as worse than that bear all the marks of media fabrication.

Contrast that with Clinton’s long record of large scale wickedness. Hillary Clinton is the godmother of a family that makes the Gambinos, Lucianos and Massinos look like third-rate amateurs in comparison. All of this controversy over her private server e-mails is not just a matter of careless negligence with state secrets. The post-subpoena deletion of thousands of her e-mails, much like the disappearance of all those Rose Law Firm files pertaining to the Whitewater deal after the “suicide” of Vincent Foster twenty three years ago, was felonious tampering with evidence when the Clinton family was under investigation. Skipping over the details of Whitewater, which dates back to when Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas, as Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is accused of selling public office for personal profit. Under her secretariat the State Department made massive arms deals with governments that were known to be sponsors of the very jihadi terrorists the United States was ostensibly at war with – governments which happened to have made large donations to the Clinton Foundation – and awarded government contracts, in, for example, the rebuilding of post-earthquake Haiti, to friends of the Clintons who were also large private donors to the Clinton Foundation. For decades every time a Clinton has held public office – be it Senator or Secretary of State in the case of Hillary or President or diplomat in the case of Bill – their actions have served the interests of Wall Street financiers and corporate globalists, who have paid them back with six digit fees for speeches the transcripts of which have been kept from the public until – against the Clintons’ wishes – they were brought to light by whistleblowers recently.

Which leads us to the policies and platform of the two candidates. As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy involved the destabilization of regimes deemed insufficiently democratic, like those in Libya, Egypt, and Syria, and the support of rebel groups even if they happened to be Islamic jihadists such as the ones who established the Islamic State. The most hawkish member of the Obama administration, her belligerent confrontational attitude towards Russia – and her insane proposal of a no-fly zone over Syria – is likely to bring about the very head-to-head Russian-American confrontation that every American president from Truman through Reagan sought to avoid during the years of the arms race and MAD. Trump, by contrast, says that it would be a good thing if America got along with the Russian and Syrian governments, and concentrated on fighting their mutual foe in ISIS. Trump’s foreign policy is sensible – Clinton’s is sheer madness. Then consider that Clinton wants to bring into the United States record numbers of “refugees” from the parts of the world she bombed as Secretary of State and will continue to bomb as President. Any sane person can see that “invade the world, invite the world” is a recipe for disaster and, from her past record we know that she will attempt to deal with the terrorist violence that this imbecilic combination is sure to bring upon her country by increasing domestic surveillance, thus threatening the civil liberties of all Americans.

Add to this the facts that she believes that the ongoing slaughter of the unborn is a sacred right that must be protected, is certain to continue Obama’s policy of inciting anti-white, anti-cop racial violence of the sort that took place in Charlotte, North Carolina this summer, and will step up the Obama administration’s heavy-handed attempts to force traditional religious believers to conform to the dictates of progressive ideology, and there is only one conclusion to which any person capable of rationally weighing the evidence can come to. Those voting for Hillary Clinton will be choosing the greater evil. They might as well write in Cthulhu on their ballots.

Progressive Do-Gooders and Racial Realities

In The Warden, the first volume of Anthony Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire, we are given an illustration of the mischief which zealous, progressive social reformers can do when they have the support of the news media. The title character is the Reverend Septimus Harding, an elderly clergyman who is the warden of an almshouse operated by the Church of England in the fictional cathedral town of Barchester. A zealous young social reformer and the suitor of the warden’s daughter, Dr. John Bold believes that the warden receives too high of an income from the property which had been donated to establish the almshouse, and takes legal action to correct this perceived injustice. While Bold is able to keep his knowledge of the fact that the warden is a good and honest man in a separate compartment of his mind from that in which he has formed his opinion about the warden’s income, his friend Tom Towers, publisher of the powerful newspaper The Jupiter, joins his crusade by writing and publishing a couple of articles in which he paints the warden in as negative of a light as possible as a greedy hypocrite and robber of the poor. When Bold goes to Towers, tells him that he is wrong about the warden and asks him not to publish any such stories again, he is told that to do so would defraud the public.

Trollope’s novel was first published in the middle of the 19th century and the causes which inflame self-righteous social reformers have changed between then and now. One of the causes which the John Bolds and Tom Towerses of the present day are obsessed with is that of correcting racial injustices. Or rather, that of combating “racism”, which is not quite the same thing. This obsession dates back to World War II, the American Civil Rights Movement, and the international indignation over the policy of apartheid practiced by South Africa back before it became a failed state.

Many are the Septimus Hardings who have fallen victim to the self-righteousness of the pompous do-gooders and their anti-racist crusade. In 1995, award winning editorial writer Samuel Francis was fired from the Washington Times. A few years earlier, Joseph Sobran, a brilliant protégé of William F. Buckley Jr. had been fired from National Review by his old mentor. In both cases the writers were fired by supposedly conservative publications after progressives had accused them of racism – or in Sobran’s case anti-Semitism – over something they had written and said.

The latest victims are Patrick J. Buchanan and John Derbyshire.

Buchanan is a syndicated columnist, a best-selling author, a former adviser and speechwriter to three US Presidents, and a three time candidate for the US Presidency himself. He was fired from the television news network MSNBC earlier this year. Progressives had been demanding that he be fired ever since the publication, last year, of his latest book Suicide of a Superpower, which included a chapter on “The End of White America”. The network’s president announced in January that he thought what Buchanan had written was not appropriate for “the national dialogue” (1) and in February, Buchanan was fired.

John Derbyshire is the author of several books, including We are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism. He is also a freelance writer who until recently was published by National Review. Late last week he committed the terrible sin of writing an article for the webzine Taki’s Mag entitled “The Talk: Non-black Version”. Several articles had been published recently which discussed conversations certain black parents had with their children warning them about the racism and prejudice they can expect at the hands of white America. Derbyshire’s article was a response to these in which he presented an alternative “talk”, which he says is derived from conversations he has had with his own mixed-race children about black people. The leftist gutter press, including such trash rags as the Atlantic, the Guardian, and the Huffington Post, threw a conniption over this article and the once conservative magazine’s editor Richard Lowry (2) fired him this past weekend.

What had Francis, Sobran, Buchanan, and now Derbyshire said to warrant this outrage? Did they demand the re-establishment of de jure segregation? Did they suggest that black slavery should be reinstated? Did they say that blacks or members of any other race should be denied the civil rights and legal protections of other citizens? Did they call for the persecution or extermination of people on the basis of their skin colour?

Judging from the hysterical denunciations of these men penned by progressives and pseudoconservatives onewould think that they did all of the above, but in fact they did none of the above, nor anything remotely similar.

These men were accused of racism because they rejected the progressive narrative in which whites, and only whites, are the perpetrators of racism, and non-whites, and only non-whites, are the victims of racism. They were accused of racism because they did not accept the idea that it is “racist” for white people to think of themselves collectively as a group and to look out for their own interests and those of their children but that it is not racist for people of other races to be conscious of a racial identity and work to advance their interests. They were accused of racism because they objected to the way in which governments of Western countries were using liberal immigration policies to adversely affect the future well-being of white people. (3) They were accused of racism because they refused to abide by the liberal-imposed taboos against the discussion of facts which conflict with the idea that the best way to deal with the reality of race is to pretend it does not exist.

Samuel Francis had given a speech in which he connected the achievements of Western civilization to the character of the people who built that civilization and suggested that the survival of that culture and civilization required the survival of that people. (4)

Joseph Sobran, who wanted the United States to withdraw from global military endeavours when the Cold War ended, warned that America’s close relationship with Israel could potentially lead her into perpetual war with the Arab nations. (5)

Patrick Buchanan wrote a jeremiad about the decline of America that pointed out that the USA will be irrevocably changed once whites become a minority in America, as is scheduled to happen before this century is half over, and dared to question whether that change will be for the better.

John Derbyshire told his half-European, half-Asian children that as individuals black people are entitled to the same courtesy and respect as any other citizen, that as a group “there is great variation among blacks in every human trait (except, obviously, the trait of identifying oneself as black)”, that there are major differences between blacks and whites in terms of group averages, and that in certain specific circumstances there is reason to be afraid of blacks. (6)

These men lost their jobs because progressive liberals had determined that the expression of certain facts and truths was detrimental to their cause, that everyone who expressed those facts and truths must be branded a racist and silenced, and because the executives of the largest “conservative” publications lacked the courage to stand up to the bullying demands of the left.

One man who has been much in the news over the last month, stands to lose much more than a job, however, because of the alliance between anti-racist social reformers and the media. That man is George Zimmerman. If progressives and their media allies have their way, Mr. Zimmerman will arrested, tried, and convicted of murder, and spend the rest of his life behind bars.

George Zimmerman, for those of you have been vacationing on the moon since Christmas, is a member of the neighborhood watch in the Retreat at Twin Lakes, which is a gated community in Sanford, Florida. On the evening of February 26th, he noticed a 17-year old black youth named Trayvon Martin. Martin, it turns out, had walked from the home of his father’s fiancé to a local 7-11 to buy skittles and ice tea. He was unarmed. Zimmerman thought he looked suspicious, and called police dispatch to report “looks like he is up to no good or he is on drugs or something.” The police told him they did not need him to follow Martin and that they would send a car to investigate. When the police arrived they found Martin dead and Zimmerman standing nearby. Zimmerman told them that he had shot Martin in self-defence. The police took Zimmerman in for questioning, but they did not charge him, and eventually released him.

Progressives maintain that this was an act of racism, that Zimmerman was afraid of Martin because of his skin colour, and murdered him in cold blood.

Let me say right now that I do not know that this was not a murder. Perhaps the progressives are right for once – a stopped clock is right twice a day after all – and Zimmerman deserves to rot in jail for the rest of his life. I do not know, because I do not know what happened in the interval between Zimmerman’s phone call to the police and their arrival, other than that Zimmerman shot Martin. Neither, however, do the progressives know what happened. They were not there anymore than I was.

I do know that the media falsified evidence to support the progressive interpretation of these events.

The National Broadcasting Corporation, for example, played an excerpt from Zimmerman’s call to the police that went “This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.” In fact, Zimmerman’s actual words were “This guy looks like he’s up to no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.” The words “he looks black” were in response to a direct question from the police “OK, and this guy—is he black, white or Hispanic?”

When this was made public, NBC promised to investigate, and wrote the entire thing off as an “error”. (7)

It is difficult to imagine an “error” that would edit a conversation and make it into a racist statement. It is not difficult, unfortunately, to think of a plausible reason why a media company would intentionally do so.

Think about it. There are countless numbers of tragic deaths that occur in the United States every year. Why has this particular case attracted international media attention?

It has done so because the case has been depicted in the media as a classic example of racism. It has been turned into a morality tale to instruct us as to the evils that come from racial profiling. It is being offered as proof that the United States, over 140 years after abolishing slavery, over 40 years after the abolition of Jim Crow and the replacement of de jure discrimination against blacks with de jure discrimination in their favour, and 4 years since they elected their first black President, is a white racist society. The story of racist Zimmerman shooting down an innocent youth in cold blood because he was black is a story tailor-made to suit the purposes of those progressive anti-racists who seem to think that Adolf Hitler is going to break out of hell and start up anew in North America any day now.

The facts of the story, however, do not seem to fit the mold into which the progressive media has been trying to force it.

For one thing, Zimmerman, despite his German/Jewish last name, is not white. He is of mixed race, his father being white, his mother being Peruvian Hispanic. He identifies himself as Hispanic when voting. The media has taken to referring to him as a “white Hispanic”, although he is of dark complexion and it is not customary to refer to people of mixed ancestry in this way. It does not seem to have occurred to the media, that their insistence upon calling Zimmerman “white” in order to associate the shooting of Martin with “whiteness” is itself racist against whites.

For another thing there is evidence to support Zimmerman’s account. The police reported that he was bleeding from his nose and the back of his head and that he showed signs of having been on the ground himself. The surveillance video of Zimmerman entering the police station, despite claims by ABC News to the contrary, shows those injuries. A witness testified to seeing Zimmerman lying on the ground with Martin on top of him punching him.

It should go without saying that this event was a tragedy one way or another. A 17 year old, unarmed kid, was shot dead on his way home from the store. However he dressed, whatever he called himself on Twitter, he did not deserve that. Having said that, however, it does not follow that Zimmerman is the cold-blooded killer that he has been portrayed as in the media. The way the media has handled this affairs means that it will be virtually impossible for Zimmerman to receive a fair trial if he is arrested and charged. Sir William Blackstone once said that it is “better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.” Progressives appear to be willing to sacrifice this noble principle, a key element of the English concept of justice, to the cause of anti-racism.

What the progressives want us to believe is that the Martin shooting proves that white racism is a significant social problem in Obama’s “post-racial” America which justifies legislation and social programs aimed at correcting that problem. The facts are otherwise. If there is a major problem with racism in the USA today it is not the racism of whites against blacks, but of blacks against whites.

Data compiled by the American government demonstrates that the vast majority of crimes committed in the United States are intraracial, i.e., committed against someone of the same race as the person committing the crime. When whites commit crimes, it is most often against other whites, when blacks commit crimes it is most often against other blacks.

The date also shows that interracial crimes, i.e., crimes committed against someone of a different race than the perpetrator, are far more often committed by blacks against whites, than the other way around. (8)

Progressives insist that crimes should receive a greater punishment if they can be shown to be motivated by racial prejudice. They have succeeded in getting laws passed against “hate crimes” in many places. Yet black on white crimes, despite being more frequent than white on black crimes, are seldom if ever treated as hate crimes. Nor do they receive the media attention that the much rarer white on black crimes receive. Particular black on white crimes only seem to receive the kind of media attention the shooting of Trayvon Martin has received when they involve a celebrity like O. J. Simpson.

The progressive/media campaign against racism is a very selective campaign indeed. Certain statements are mercilessly condemned as “racist” when made by whites, even if they are unquestionably true, whereas violent crimes committed against whites are excused as being the expectable response to white racism, rather than racism against whites.

In Trollope’s novel the efforts of John Bold and Tom Towers do not, in the end, help the people in whose name they had appointed themselves to speak but actually make their condition worse. Towers’ accusations drive the warden from the almshouse, the bishop decides not to replace him because of the controversy surrounding the warden’s income, the institution falls into decline, and the residents are deprived of a good friend and of the allowance he had paid them out of his own pocket.

How about the progressive campaign against racism? Has it benefited those in whose name it is fought?

No, it has not. The major injustices committed against blacks in the United States, slavery and de jure segregation, have been abolished for decades. The anti-racist movement continues to blame the problems blacks face today on these injustices however. This does nothing to improve relations between the races, generating distrust on both sides. If blacks and whites both would be benefited from better race relations, then the anti-racist movement is harming both races.

Black people have far more important problems than racism to deal with. Many live in urban centres that have been turned into slums by misguided urban planning on the part of the American federal government (9). A black middle class took shape and began to grow in the decades before the Civil Rights movement began (10), but upward mobility among American blacks has actually slowed down since the Civil Rights movement many urban blacks today find themselves trapped in multi-generational poverty and dependence in part due to anti-family incentives in social programs designed ironically to combat poverty (11). A negative culture which glorifies crime and violence and preys upon black youth has developed and this culture contributes significantly to the high crime rates, both as perpetrators and victims, among American blacks (12).

Progressive and media anti-racism encourages black leaders to turn white people into scapegoats for all these problems rather than to seek real solutions to them. It also contributes to the problems, especially the violent youth culture.

Everybody, white and black alike, suffers from the actions of our contemporary anti-racist John Bolds. If anyone benefits, it is the self-righteous progressive do-gooders themselves, who are usually the first to put into practice in their personal lives the advice John Derbyshire gave his children in his brilliant article.

1. Patrick Buchanan tells the story of his firing in this column here: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/blog/2012/02/16/blacklisted-but-not-beaten/ You can read my review of his book here: http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2011/11/fate-of-america.html

2. Lowry became editor of National Review in 1997. The editor who preceded him was John O’Sullivan, who had taken over the editorship when Buckley stepped down and semi-retired in 1988. Officially O’Sullivan announced that he was resigning the editorship. There is evidence, however, that William F. Buckley Jr. forced him to step down. O’Sullivan had approved a cover story for the magazine entitled “Time to Rethink Immigration?” in 1992, written by finance columnist Peter Brimelow, who would later write the 1995 bestseller Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster calling for immigration restriction and found the immigration restrictionist webzine VDare. Brimelow was fired from National Review at about the same time O’Sullivan “stepped down.” The new editor, Lowry, brought the magazine more in line with “neo-conservatism”, an ideology originally associated with former ‘60’s and ‘70’s radicals and liberals like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, which basically consists of support for American military crusades to spread democracy and capitalism around the globe, a strong American alliance with Israel, free trade and immigration. .

3. Sobran was a late convert to the immigration reform/restrictionist movement, following the publication of Buchanan’s State of Emergency.

4. The speech was given at the first American Renaissance conference in May 1994. It was later adapted into the article “Why Race Matters: The assault on our race and culture must be met in explicitly racial terms”, which appeared as the cover story of the September 1994 issue of American Renaissance. It can be read online here: http://www.amren.com/ar/1994/09/#cover American Renaissance is a monthly publication that deals entirely with racial issues. It was founded by Jared Taylor, a Yale University graduate, whose book Paved With Good Intentions, first published by Carroll & Graf in 1993, argues that efforts to create racial harmony in the United States following the American Civil Rights Movement through affirmative action and the dismantling of white racial identity have in fact produced the opposite of racial harmony. Politically, Taylor holds to a modified libertarianism in which the state restricts immigration, but is domestically colour blind. Taylor has pointed to studies that show that people of all races prefer to associate mostly with members of their own race, and argues that people of all races should be free to self-segregate or to mix, as they wish. His views can be taken to be the editorial position of American Renaissance, which publishes well-written articles by academics or scientists (some writing under pseudonyms for obvious reasons) which challenge the various racial taboos of progressive America.

5. Sobran expressed these opinions, not in the pages of National Review, but in his syndicated column. This was around the time of Patrick Buchanan’s first presidential campaign and Buchanan expressed similar views, as did Charley Reese of the Orlando Sentinel. It is noteworthy that these conservative columnists were all strong Israel supporters during the Cold War. Each of them believed that the USA should withdraw from military interventionism and adopt a position of armed neutrality after the collapse of the Soviet threat. The accusations of anti-Semitism came primarily from neo-conservatives who wanted the exact opposite of this, a Pax Americana in which liberalism, capitalism, and democracy would be spread throughout the world with the backing of the US military. Often the progressives who repeat the neo-conservatives accusations of anti-Semitism against men like the Buchanan, Reese, and the late Sobran, are the same progressives who lionize Palestianian terrorists as “freedom fighters” and demonize Israel as an “apartheid state”.

6. http://takimag.com/article/the_talk_nonblack_version_john_derbyshire While I don’t agree with his advice in 10h, the facts as he presents them are correct, and his advice based upon them is largely common sense.

7. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/post/nbc-issues-apology-on-zimmerman-tape-screw-up/2012/04/03/gIQA8m5jtS_blog.html h/t Lawrence Auster http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/022083.html

8. http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/williams081899.asp This column was written in 1999. In it Dr. Walter E. Williams, Professor of Economics at George Mason University, tells how he independently verified the findings of The Color of Crime, a report published by the New Century Foundation earlier that year. The New Century Foundation is the company that publishes American Renaissance, referred to in footnote 4. In 2005 a second, updated, and enlarged edition of The Colour of Crime was published. It is available to download in .pdf format here: http://www.colorofcrime.com/colorofcrime2005.pdf The report finds that blacks commit 85% of interracial crime in the United States, and whites commit 15%. Blacks are 12% of the American population, whites are over 60%. Note carefully what these figures say and what they do not say. They do not say that the majority of black Americans commit interracial crimes. They do say that the vast majority of interracial crimes in America are committed by black Americans.


9. Kirkpatrick Sale demonstrates how slums are created on pages 117-122 of Human Scale (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1980). The example he uses is the South Bronx. He traces its decline, beginning with federal government intervention in the housing market after World War II to housing projects in the 60’s and 70’s. He does so to illustrate the concept of prytaneogenesis – “damage actually generated by the state”.

10. The history of this can be read in Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom’s America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).

11. A strong family structure helps deter multi-generational poverty. This structure is weakened when social programs provide – unintentionally – incentives to men to desert their wives and children, for a father and mother not to marry, and for women have children outside of wedlock with multiple fathers and raise those children alone. See Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1984, 1994), particularly pages 124-133.

12. If you look at the total number of crimes committed in the United States, and break it down by race, blacks do not commit the majority of crimes in the United States. They do, however, commit a very disproportionate percentage of the crimes. What that means is that for the vast majority of American crimes, the percentage committed by blacks is much higher than the roughly 12% that is their percentage of the American population. Progressives typically explain these figures away by accusing police and judges of being racist. Racial arrest and conviction figures however, correlate strongly with the racial analysis of the testimony of crime victims. The Color of Crime, referred to and linked to in footnote 8 does this correlation. The most recent edition is 7 years old but updated source data is available for at the websites of the FBI and the US Bureau of Justice. The US Bureau of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey can be found here: http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=dcdetail&iid=245 The following link includes a number of reports from the survey that deal specifically with race: http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=922 The FBI’s United Crime Reports can be found here: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/ucr Reports for the years 1995 to 2010 are available as is a preliminary report for 2011. To find the racial figures, first click on one of the years, then on “rates” under “Offences Known to Law Enforcement”. This will open a page with a series of options in a horizontal bar at the top. Click “Persons Arrested” then choose the options available for “race” under Expanded Arrest Data at the bottom of the page. Note carefully, that because most crime is intraracial, these figures mean not only that blacks commit a disproportionate number of American crimes, but that they are victims at a disproportionately high rate as well. Therefore, the constant attempts of progressives and their media allies, to slander and libel anyone who points these facts out as a “racist”, is harmful rather than helpful to black Americans, because it covers up a problem that afflicts them worse than anyone else in the USA.

The Fate of America

Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? By Patrick J. Buchanan, New York, Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press, 2011, 488 pp, $27.99US

In the first half of the 20th Century the European powers clashed in two major conflicts that are remembered as World War I and World War II. When the second war ended in 1945, the nations of Europe were in ruins, their empires were lost, and two strong new powers emerged triumphant. The history of the second half of the 20th Century was largely the story of their rivalry. We called these powers the superpowers and they were the United States of America on the one hand and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the other. Both had nuclear arsenals, containing weapons of mass destruction far more powerful than the atomic bomb, the development and use of which had brought WWII to an end. These weapons kept the superpowers from waging a traditional war against each other and so their conflict came to be known as the Cold War.

The Cold War brought out tremendous differences of opinion among people. Some felt that the threat of nuclear holocaust, never before present, meant that peace must be achieved no matter the cost. Others believed that the Soviet tyranny, which already held millions in its clutches, had to be prevented from spreading.

It was at the height of the Cold War that Patrick J. Buchanan began his career in journalism. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, he also worked as a speechwriter and senior advisor to US Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan. Both as an op/ed writer and a presidential advisor, he worked to promote America’s efforts in her struggle against the Soviet Union.

Then the Cold War ended, shortly after Reagan’s second term as US President. The Berlin Wall came down in 1989, the Soviet Union broke up in 1991. The United States was now the sole remaining superpower. The question naturally arose of what America would do with its military might in the absence of the threat of he Soviet Union. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait then-US President George H. W. Bush gave his answer. The United States would lead a coalition of free, democratic countries that would police the world, establishing a new world order and keeping it safe against aggressors like Hussein.

Pat Buchanan had a different idea. Running against Bush, he sought the Republican nomination for the 1992 Presidential election. He opposed the Gulf War and in his campaign he called for America to close its overseas bases and bring her soldiers home. Invoking George Washington’s rhetoric about “entangling alliance” he called upon the United States to return to the older, non-interventionist foreign policy of “America First”.

This was not the only plank in his platform, of course, nor would it be the only time he would run for President. He sought the Republican nomination again in 1996 and in 2000 he ran for President on the Reform Party ticket. Apart from the “America First” foreign policy that was labeled “isolationism” by his opponents, he championed economic nationalism against free trade, an end to liberal immigration, and reversing the moral, cultural, and spiritual decline of America.

Mr. Buchanan’s campaigns were unsuccessful, but his books became bestsellers. In The Great Betrayal he argued for the Hamiltonian “American system” of economic nationalism. In A Republic Not an Empire he made the case for an “America First” policy by tracing the history of American foreign policy. In The Death of the West he discussed the impending demographic crisis of Western society caused by low fertility rates, aging populations and mass immigration. In State of Emergency he took a closer look at the immigration crisis the United States is currently facing.

In his latest book, Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? he revisits each of these topics in the light of current state of the United States following the economic meltdown, the quagmire in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the Obama presidency. Although the final chapter offers prescriptions as to how to steer America away from the brink of doom the overall tone of the book reflects the pessimism in its title. The main theme of the book is “we have lost the country we grew up in”.(1)

In a sense that is the theme of all of Mr. Buchanan’s books and that partly explains why so many of them have become best-sellers. As a writer, Pat Buchanan is excellent at articulating what is in the hearts and minds of countless numbers of his countrymen who are unable to or do not wish to express what they are thinking. It is a theme that conservatives and patriots of other countries can sympathize with as well.

Do not be fooled by the subtitle of the book into thinking that something huge is supposed to happen in the year 2025. The subtitle is an allusion to an essay by a Russian dissident who in 1970 predicted the downfall of the Soviet Union. The predicted event which looms large in this book is actually scheduled for the year 2041. That is the year when, according to the most recent census bureau extrapolations, white Americans will become a minority in the United States.

The bulk of the book, from chapter four “The End of White America” to chapter nine “’The White Party’”, examines the question of what this will mean for America. The titles of both those chapters are quotations by the way, although only the second one uses quotation marks. The first borrows its title from an essay by Vassar professor Hua Hsu and the second from a gaffe by Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean. They seem to have been chosen to deliberately provoke the ire of the sort of people who think that emotional accusations of “racism” are a more appropriate response to people who do not consider multiculturalism and diversity to be unqualified positives than actually answering their questions and arguments.

The idea that a great deal of diversity and the absence of an ethnic core make for a stronger society is one of the sacred cows of the post-WWII, post-Civil Rights Movement, post-European colonialism/imperialism, post-apartheid South Africa world. There are no rational reasons to believe it and there is a great deal of evidence which contradicts it. When someone points out the lack of correlation between the idea and the real world that person is like the child in Hans Christian Andersons’ fairy tale who points out the obvious fact denied by everybody else that the emperor is running around buck naked.

This is what Mr. Buchanan does in Suicide of a Superpower. The attempt to transform a country from a country founded by and for a particular people with a particular language, culture, and religion into a country for all peoples of all languages, cultures, and religions, while remaining a stable, united, society with just laws protecting its citizens’ rights and liberties, is an experiment that has never been attempted before. There is little evidence to suggest the experiment will succeed and much to indicate that it is doomed to fail.

The impending demographic doom of white America has been brought upon by a combination of low fertility and high immigration. The decline in fertility resulting in rapidly aging populations that are not reproducing themselves is not strictly an American phenomenon and in chapter five we learn about how it is affecting other countries such as Russia, the UK, Germany, Israel, Japan and South Korea. Some of these have opted for high immigration like the United States. Others, like Japan and South Korea “appear prepared to accept their fate, a dying population and declining nation, rather than adopt the American solution: replacement of her departing native born with millions of immigrants.” (p. 169)

The American solution is no solution at all. In chapter nine, entitled “The Triumph of Tribalism”, Mr. Buchanan begins by borrowing a thesis from a 2008 Foreign Affairs article by Jerry Muller which challenged the conventional belief that the history of the 20th Century was one of nationalism being superceded by transnationalism after it led to the devastation of the two World Wars. The peaceful coexistence of the European powers after WWII, Muller argue, was not the result of the eclipse of nationalism but of its goals having been fulfilled. Ethnonationalism has actually been on the rise throughout the 20th Century.

Mr. Buchanan then walks us through the history of the 20th Century showing how this has been the case. From the ethnic conflict in the Balkans which ignited the first World War and started up again the moment the Communist regime in Yugoslavia fell, through World War II and the crisis in the Middle East, the renewed tribalism and nationalism in Africa and Asia after the end of European colonialism, to the nationalist movements that brought down the Soviet Empire, ethnonationalism has been a consistent factor in the history of the world in the 20th and 21st Centuries.

What this suggests is that the large-scale importation of immigrants from ethnic backgrounds widely different from both your own and from each other with no program whereby to assimilate them into a common national identity such as was signified by the “melting pot” metaphor in earlier waves of American immigration will not have the result of producing a stronger nation but of balkanizing your country. The tribal nature of mankind is the final unanswerable refutation of the idea that “diversity is our strength”, which Mr. Buchanan had ably debunked in the preceding chapter “The Diversity Cult”.

Mr. Buchanan does not just debunk the diversity myth though. He asks the question we are forbidden to ask:

Is ethnonationalism a genetic disease of mankind that all good men should quarantine wherever it breaks out? Or is this drive of awakened peoples to create nations of their own where there own kind come first a force of nature that must be accommodated if we are ever to know peace? (p. 327)

He reminds us that while ethnonationalism produced horrors “from Nanking to Auschwitz to Rwanda” it also “liberated the captive nations and brought down the ‘evil empire’”. It “was behind the pogroms of Europe but created the nation of Israel” (contrary to the lies Mr. Buchanan’s opponents constantly throw at him he clearly does not intend the former to be the good and the latter the bad in this juxtaposition).

Within all of this there lies another question, asked indirectly here, but which more and more people have come to ask in the last couple of decades. If ethnonationalism is tolerated among other peoples – and it is - why should it be forbidden to white ethnic groups?

Whatever the answer may be, Mr. Buchanan is surely correct in writing:

We may deny the existence of ethnonationalism, detest it, condemn it. But this creator and destroyer of empires and nations is a force infinitely more powerful than globalism, for it engages the heart. Men will die for it. (p. 328)

In today’s climate in which the leftist orthodoxy on cultural and ethnic matters that is known as “political correctness” is rigidly enforced, this is not the safe way to write a book about the impending perils which face your country. Suicide of a Superpower is about more than just ethnicity, immigration, and race. It is also about the economic crisis, the ultra-expensive military fiascos in the Middle East, and the moral and spiritual decline of America. There is even a chapter about the problems the Roman Catholic Church is facing worldwide.

The demographic crisis of America is the ongoing theme of six of the books eleven chapters however. While it may not be a safe topic it is a necessary one. Countries can survive huge military disasters. Countries can survive economic collapses. They cannot survive the loss of a central ethnic identity. A country is more than just a set of laws written on a piece of paper. Its political and legal institutions rest upon the foundation of a people with a shared history and identity which binds them together as a community and a society. When that is gone those political and legal institutions cannot stand.

(1) Variations of this phrase occur at a number of spots in this book. Although I have placed it in quotations it is not intended to be an exact quote of any one of them but an approximation of all of them.

The Reality at the End of the Rainbow

Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa by Ilana Mercer, Seattle, Stairway Press, 2011, 319 pages, $24.95

In Jean Raspail’s prophetic novel The Camp of the Saints an armada of decrepit ships containing a million invaders armed only with their own wretchedness slowly makes its way on a long trek from Calcutta around Africa to the coast of France. The eyes of the world are upon France, to see how she will respond. Will she muster up the spirit to defend herself against an invasion of the weak or will she succumb to liberal guilt and offer no resistance? As the armada approaches the Cape of Good Hope the thought arises that perhaps the ships would land in South Africa instead. South Africa is depicted as it was in 1973 when Raspail’s novel was first published – a pariah state, condemned by the world for its racism and apartheid. Her president calls a press conference in which he announces that “not a single refugee from the Ganges will set foot alive on South African soil”. Then a few days later, as the fleet rounds the Cape it is intercepted by the South African navy, which loads the ships up with food, water and medical supplies. All of these are promptly thrown overboard into the ocean and the leftist media is left to debate the Afrikaners motives and to praise the refugees for not compromising their principles and accepting help from the evil racists.

In the course of this episode, Raspail places a very interesting sentence in the mouth of the President of South Africa. In his address to the hostile reporters he says “Just let me make one thing clear: the Republic of South Africa is a white nation with eighty percent blacks, and not—as the world would like to think of us, in the name of some mythical equality—a black nation with twenty percent whites”. The President took it for granted that those hearing his words would never understand them. It is unlikely that many people would. Most people today have never viewed South Africa other than through the tinted lenses of left-wing propaganda which demonized the Republic prior to 1994 and has flattered and praised it ever since.

1994 was the year in which Nelson Mandela was elected President of South Africa in the first democratic election open to all South Africans of all races. The election was held on the 27th of April, less than a month after my eighteenth birthday and I remember well the huge fuss everybody made over it. I also remember the indignant, self-righteous tones in which South Africa was spoken of by teachers, clergymen, and journalists in the years leading up to that election. This was particularly the case with those who describe themselves as liberals. The term “liberal” is supposed to mean generous and broad-minded but is curiously applied to those who least display these characteristics. William F. Buckley Jr. once said that “liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.” This is certainly the case with regards to South Africa and apartheid.

Although liberals may not like it, there is another side to the story of South Africa and apartheid. Occasionally, in the years before the triumph of Nelson Mandela, a courageous conservative writer would present that side in his columns. Charley Reese of the Orlando Sentinel and Patrick Buchanan and Sam Francis of the Washington Times were examples in the United States. The much-maligned Doug Collins of the North Shore News was a Canadian example. The best treatment of the subject from that era that I have encountered was the article “The Race for South Africa” by British historian Paul Johnson which was published in the September 1985 issue of Commentary. Johnson, argued against the economic pressure being placed on South Africa by the United States on the grounds that South Africa was being singled out for condemnation over things which were in fact (and still are) typical of all African nations when she should be praised for those things which at the time set her apart – its wealth, modern economy, rising real incomes for blacks, and its relative freedom compared to other countries on the African continent.

It has been much harder to find voices questioning the left-wing orthodoxy on South Africa since 1994. A myth has developed about how justice, freedom, and equality have triumphed in the “Rainbow Nation” under the wise leadership of Nelson Mandela. This myth was recently translated into film by director Clint Eastwood in Invictus. It is very seldom challenged.

This is most unfortunate because it is now, more than ever, that the progressive orthodoxy on South Africa needs to be challenged. In the 1994 general election, South Africa transitioned from being a classical republic, with working institutions and the rule of law, to a mass democracy, perpetually governed by a corrupt socialist party, that has brought about cultural decline, economic disaster, and the collapse of the rule of law. Worse, South Africa has changed from being a country in which people were excluded from social equality and full participation in the political process on the basis of their race to being a country where people are targeted for extermination on the basis of their skin color.

One of the very few writers to faithfully report on this transformation for the worse has been Ilana Mercer. Mrs. Mercer’s concern over the state of affairs in South Africa is understandable. It is the country of her birth and the country to which she returned after being raised in Israel. She and her family left South Africa in 1995, moving first to British Columbia here in Canada and then to the United States. It was during her years in Canada that I first encountered her writings in the pages of the Report Newsmagazine. She is now a columnist with WorldNewsDaily and has over the years told the story the rest of the media is not telling in her Friday column there.

Now, after a long struggle to find a publisher, her book Into the Cannibal’s Pot has finally been released. She describes her book, in the final sentence of the introduction, as “a labor of love to my homelands, old and new”, and throughout this fascinating volume she takes her reader back and forth from South Africa to the United States, drawing parallels and contrasts, and uttering warnings which, for the Americans sake, one hopes will not fall like Cassandra’s on deaf ears. The warnings are timely for non-American Westerners as well, for most of the trends she describes can be found – and indeed, have often progressed further – in other Western countries as well.

Into the Cannibal’s Pot is largely the story of a people, the Afrikaners. After describing the epidemic of violent crime that has swept South Africa since 1994 in her first chapter, in her second chapter Mrs. Mercer tells us about the genocide that is being perpetrated against the Afrikaners. It is in this context that she gives us the background and history of this fascinating, widely reviled, and universally misunderstood people.

The Afrikaners are a people, of European stock (primarily Dutch, with some French and German mixed in) who evolved an ethnic identity of their own over centuries in Africa. A hard-working farming people, with a strict Calvinist Protestant faith, they speak a language of their own, Afrikaans.

It is vital that we understand this, because the biggest mistake the rest of the world made concerning South Africa in the 20th Century, was to try and force the South African situation into a pre-made framework of white vs. black. It was never that simple.

The Afrikaners were conquered by the British Empire in the Boer Wars of the 19th Century. Under British Imperial rule, a program of Anglicization was attempted, to try and make the Afrikaners give up their language and culture. This program failed, and it sparked a nationalist fervor among the Afrikaners that gave birth to the National Party which was elected into office in 1948, withdrew South Africa from the British Commonwealth and declared her a Republic in 1961, and which governed until 1994. Although some of the elements of the system had been put into place under British rule it was the National Party that introduced full-blown apartheid to South Africa.

The rest of the world saw apartheid in terms of racial oppression and injustice. All we could see was a country in which a white minority had all the power from which the black majority was excluded. We saw this as being unfair and demanded that the country change to suit our (very recently formed) notions of racial justice. When they refused we put economic pressure upon them and forced them to change.

What we did not see was that for the Afrikaners, who had survived an attempt to erase their ethnicity, and were in the process of securing their independence, the one-person, one-vote, majoritarian democracy the rest of the world demanded that South Africa adapt, would mean their subjugation and eventual eradication.

Unfortunately for the Afrikaners the moment in which they chose to assert their national independence occurred at the same time the anti-colonialist cause was triumphing. Great Britain, France, and the other great colonial powers of Europe, were withdrawing abandoning their colonies, giving up their empires, withdrawing their nationals, and handing power over to governments elected in democratic votes in the newly formed countries that were their former colonies. This did not work out well for these new “countries”. In her fourth chapter Ilana Mercer discusses how the rest of Africa has fared in the post-colonial era and in her fifth chapter, masterfully explodes what she calls “the colonialism canard”, i.e., the myth promoted by celebrity do-gooders and other progressive twits, that all of the suffering and poverty and tribal warfare in present day Africa is the fault of European colonialism.

The world, however, was convinced of the righteousness of anti-colonialism and the South African situation smacked of colonialism to the progressives, even though the Afrikaners were not colonial nationals of any European power, and had no home country in Europe to return to. South Africa was their home country. They had, in fact, been there longer than many of the black tribes. This meant nothing to anti-colonialist, progressives, who smugly and self-righteously condemned the Afrikaners and demanded that South Africa kowtow to world opinion and reorganize itself according to the majority-rule ideal.

William F. Buckley Jr. once said “Some day, when you have nothing else to do, come up with a solution for South Africa, won’t you? But remember the rules of the game. All the marbles have to end up each in a cavity—you can’t just throw a few of them away, to make the game simpler.”

No such solution appeared to be possible. Majority rule in South Africa would have been an injustice to the Afrikaners. Apartheid was an injustice to South African blacks. It was not intended to be such. The word “apartheid” refers to the condition of being separate. The National Party used this term in the sense of “separate development”. The Republic, would be a representative government elected by the Afrikaner nation and other white South Africans. The blacks would be assigned to tribal homelands where they could develop their own forms of self-government. That way the Afrikaners would not be subjected to the injustice of being permanently dominated by the black majority, and the blacks would be able to develop on their own in their own homelands.

While that might sound reasonable on paper there was no way of justly putting it into practice. It required a strict and petty system of racial classification backed up by racial hygiene laws, and, since the white South Africans did not wish to ban blacks from working on their farms and in their factories, curfews and pass-laws that were strictly, and sometimes brutally, enforced by the police.

This is what the world saw in apartheid.

This is what countless people, including Ilana Mercer’s father Rabbi Ben Isaacson protested against.

That is was unjust is undeniable. This reviewer does not deny that and Mrs. Mercer states it frequently throughout her book.

It is a question of which is the greater injustice – apartheid, or the injustice that has resulted from the rise of the ANC to power as a result of the introduction of majoritarian democracy to South Africa. Most people avoid this question. Mrs. Mercer tackles it head on and does not hesitate to give the honest answer.

Which is the greater injustice, being barred from voting in an election or being denied the rule of law and subjected to an onslaught of violent crime?

The ANC has proven unable – or unwilling – to maintain law and order in South Africa and a massive outbreak of violent crime has been the result. In her first chapter, Mrs. Mercer provides illustrations of the brutality of this crime, then provides us with an analysis of crime statistics from South Africa that show how it has become one of the most violent countries in the world and how the South African government and the South Africa Police Service try to disguise this fact. She shows how, even using the ANCs doctored statistics, the rate of victimization for blacks and whites alike is at least three times higher under democracy than under the old regime. She talks about how the ANC has passed and is passing laws that make it harder for people to legally defend themselves against home invasions and other violent crimes that are on the rise. She also takes a look at the racial statistics of crime in both South Africa and the United States which show that the perpetration of violent crime is not close to being equally divided between the races and that while there certainly is a lot of racially motivated crime, it is not, for the most part, committed by whites against blacks, a fact one would never know from the news media.

In her second chapter Mrs. Mercer shows how violence against the Afrikaners, especially the Boer farmers, since 1994 can only be described as a genocide. Over 3000 white farmers have been killed in South Africa since the ANC came to power. The number of Afrikaners murdered each year in South Africa exceeds the total number of blacks killed by the police in the entire history of apartheid. Mrs. Mercer quotes from genocide experts like Dr. Gregory Stanton of “Genocide Watch” who say that the rates and manner in which the farmers are being killed points to systematic extermination. She also shows the genocidal intentions of the ANC from their chants and slogans, and from the words of their leaders.

After the revelations of the second chapter, the third chapter might seem rather moderate. It is about the BEE program. BEE stands for “Black Economic Empowerment” and is an affirmative action program taken to the nth degree. Mrs. Mercer describes it as a “phased process” that “requires that all enterprises, public and private, make their workforce demographically representative of the country’s racial profile” (p. 94) If this sounds reasonable to you, Mrs. Mercer shows how this corrupt policy, under which whites have been forced to sell large parts of their companies to blacks (and lend the blacks the money to buy them) fits in to the ANC’s overall policy towards private property. Private property and the rule of law are two essential components of the kind of productive, civilized economy the Republic of South Africa had prior to 1994. The country can now no longer feed itself, the average standard of living for black South Africans as well as whites, has declined under ANC rule, and a large class of unemployed, poor, whites has developed.

If all of this sounds like South Africa is heading rapidly in the direction in which the former Rhodesia went after Western governments (including, ironically, that of apartheid South Africa) forced Ian Smith’s government to hand over power to a democratically elected government that was soon thereafter be taken over by Robert Mugabe, then turn to chapter four. As bad as Mugabe is, Mr. Mercer argues, the problems his country faces are deeper than just himself and so will survive him. They are problems that can be found all across Africa – including the South Africa of Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki who remain saints in the eyes of the Western media long after “Comrade Bob” fell into disgrace.

The person of Nelson Mandela is not a major focus of the book overall but it does come up briefly in this chapter. Here we see the real Nelson Mandela – the head of the MK, the incompetent terrorist wing of the African National Congress, the anthem of which calls for genocide against whites. No prisoner of conscience, he was arrested for attempted sabotage and sentenced to prison for conspiracy against the government. He later turned down that government’s offer to let him out if he would give up violence. Unsuccessful in their attempts to unseat the Nationalist government – it took economic pressure from the rest of the world to do that – his organization was much more successful in terrorizing other blacks who they brutalized with methods like the notorious “necklacing”, involving gas-soaked tires being thrown around people and then set on fire.

Why on earth did Western countries insist that a man like this be released from prison and applaud when he was elected into power?

In her seventh chapter, Mrs. Mercer discusses the betrayal of South Africa by the major English-speaking countries. Although she describes herself as a “classical liberal”, her arguments in this chapter are the arguments of a classical conservative. Liberty requires order, democracy is not the same thing as freedom, can be tyrannical if the proper cultural institutions are not in place to make it compatible with liberty, and is best practiced on a small-scale in say, a city. She draws parallels between the crusade to force majoritarianism on South Africa with the more recent American military campaign to bring democracy to Iraq. Both democratization campaigns worked out badly for the countries involved.

At the same time that the United States has embarked upon a crusade to bring democracy to the world she has opened her doors to mass immigration from the Third World. Mrs. Mercer explains the follies of the American immigration system which is unnecessarily leading to the kind of ethnic strife in America that is killing the land of her birth. What she says of America’s immigration system is also true of Canada’s, and virtually every other Western countries. There are lessons we all can learn from this book.

My only criticism of this book is that in the chapter where she discussed Israel, Israel’s friendship with the Old South Africa and betrayal by the New South Africa, and related subjects, she seemed to send a contradictory message, by pointing to the obvious parallels between the two countries on the one hand, and displaying indignation over the Left’s pro-Palestinian references to “Israeli apartheid” on the other. Unless she wishes to argue absurdly that everything Israel does is intrinsically just, a far better response to the leftists on this point, is to turn their own argument against them. At their insistence, Western countries boycotted South Africa and forced her to change her policies. Those policies were not the most just policies in the world, but the changes we forced upon South Africa have led to chaos, violence, and the death of a civilized country. That is exactly the same thing that will happen in Israel if we force her to give in to the Left’s demands. The parallels between Israel and pre-1994 South Africa make for a strong pro-Israeli, rather than anti-Israeli, argument if used properly.

In addition to recommending this book for personal reading, I would recommend that you talk to your local bookstores and encourage them to stock it on their shelves. Its message needs to be spread more widely than is possible when it is only available for special order.